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For nearly two weeks, residents of Ocean County’s battered barrier beach areas and others displaced from storm-ravaged Sea Bright have been begging local officials for the answer to their one most pressing question.

When can they, at last, return home for good?

The answer, unfortunately, is that no one yet knows for sure. But it seems clear that it will likely be several months before residents can return to live permanently in the Shore’s hardest-hit communities. Long Beach Islands residents had better luck. On Friday, the gas company said it hoped to restore service to most of the island by Dec. 1.

Yet a lack of concrete information from utilities and officials has led to anger and frustration on the part of residents, especially those who have not yet been able to return to their homes to retrieve possessions and assess the damage caused by superstorm Sandy.

“People are getting mad at us,” Toms River Mayor Thomas F. Kelaher said. “They are saying, ‘We want to go back, we want to go back.’ We want them to go back, but it has to be safe.”

Even for houses not damaged by the storm, the lack of gas on Ocean County’s barrier beach sections, residents would have no way to heat their homes, with the winter season just beginning, Kelaher noted.

“Nobody is going to be able to go back until that is resolved,” Kelaher said.

Seaside Heights Mayor Bill Akers agreed.

“Until all the utility companies come in with all their reports, we cannot even speculate when we can repopulate,” Akers said.

Rare disaster

Disaster recovery expert Alan Rubin, who helped lead major reconstruction efforts in South Florida after 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, said storms as severe as Sandy normally happen in areas that don’t have cold winters. That makes it easier, in some cases, for residents to return to their homes sooner.

“When you’re in Miami, if you don’t have natural gas, you can still live in your house,” said Rubin, a government relations specialist with the law firm of Cozen O’Connor in New York. “Here, you can’t really live in a house in the months of November, December, January and February with no heat.”

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Rubin estimated it could be eight to 10 months before repairs are completed on damaged natural gas lines.

But New Jersey Natural Gas spokesman Michael Kinney said he could not yet give a concrete estimate about when gas service might return for most of the damaged areas.

The company shut down natural gas lines from Bay Head south to Holgate on Long Beach Township after gas leaks led to a series of fires after the storm, including one in Brick’s Camp Osborn section that burned more than a dozen homes.

“Our first focus is the assessment of the system,” Kinney said. “At this point in time, we can’t even estimate a time frame.”

One issue, he said, is that saltwater can seep into the gas lines once natural gas pressure is shut off. If that happens, damaged pipes would have to rebuilt or replaced before gas service could be restored, he said.

The company has also been working to restore service in Sea Bright, areas of Manasquan and some mainland sections of Ocean County where gas service was shut off, Kinney said.

On Ocean County’s barrier beach, conditions vary greatly from community to community. While some towns suffered extensive damage to both homes and infrastructure, others escaped Sandy’s wrath relatively unscathed.

Berkeley Township Mayor Carmen F. Amato Jr. said the township’s beachfront sections in Pelican Island and South Seaside Park suffered less damage than Ortley Beach and other hard-hit communities like Mantoloking, Bay Head and Seaside Heights.

But although residents have been allowed to access their homes to retrieve possessions, Amato said it could be some time before they can live there.

“It’s going to be an infrastructure issue,” Amato said. “The infrastructure runs north/south, and up north they are still evaluating the gas lines. If there is a way to get power, gas and utilities safely to the residents of South Seaside Park, they could go back.”

Building frustration

Last week, residents’ frustrations were on display after Jack Sauer, 60, of Lavallette, used Facebook to organize what was supposed to be a gathering of about 450 concerned residents in a ballroom at the Toms River Holiday Inn. More than 2,000 showed up, so many that police were forced to close the roads around the hotel after traffic began to grind to a halt on Route 37.

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“I felt like government wasn’t hearing the needs and the priorities of the citizens,” Sauer said. “You know, there was a statement by one of the other police chiefs ... that we’re going to clear the island for six months, do our work, get the people out of the way. That irritated me.”

Sauer said he wanted to put pressure on elected officials to recognize that residents should not be pushed out of the way as if they were an inconvenience. While the barrier island might be uninhabitable for weeks or months, he felt residents should at least be able to get home to collect some personal belongings and winterize their homes.

Lavallette Mayor Walter G. LaCicero said he understands the frustration of residents like Sauer and those who attended the meeting at the Holiday Inn. While the south end of Lavallette was hard-hit, the borough’s northern sections came through the storm with minimal damage, he said.

The borough has its own electric utility and has been pressuring JCP&L to restore its main transmission line so that power can be restored. After that, LaCicero said, “the problem is the gas.” He said he is eager to allow residents to return and believes residents will be able to return to Lavallette before they can come back to other areas that suffered more damage.

One of those areas was Ortley Beach, just to the south, where Sandy’s storm surge and fierce winds drove a telephone pole through a downstairs window in Jacqueline and John Romero’s Coolidge Avenue home.

The Romeros, who have owned the house for 53 years, have not returned to their home since they left hastily on Oct. 29, only hours before Sandy sent a surge of seawater down their block, wiping out other houses. “There were six houses in front of mine,” said Jacqueline Romero, 69. “They’re all gone.”

The couple, who have been living with their daughter in Brick since the storm, are upset they haven’t been allowed to return to their home to retrieve possessions and attempt to shore up the damaged structure.

Jacqueline Romero said her wedding ring, her mother’s wedding photo and photographs of the couple’s five children are among the items she wants to salvage from the waterlogged house.

Township officials allowed residents to make brief visits to other parts of Toms River’s barrier beach sections late last week but have delayed access to the harder-hit Ortley Beach section until an unspecified date.

“We want to go over there to put some plywood on the side that’s facing the ocean,” Jacqueline Romero said. “The whole side is open towards the ocean. Fifty-three years of my life is over there.”

She and her husband realize they will not be able to live in the house for several months, even if it can be repaired, she said. “I know it’s going to be a long time.”

Disaster recovery expert Rubin said no matter when residents return to their homes, it will be many years before the Shore area seems the same.

“It takes between five and 10 years for the neighborhoods to look like what they were before the storm,” Rubin said. “After Andrew, it really took about 10 years before it looked anything like what it did before the storm.”